1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for neutralizing explosive devices and to a mobile unit for performing the method.
2. Prior Art
Mines, bombs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are being placed on roadways, within the roadways, and in potholes in the roadways in Iraq and Afghanistan and when an USA military vehicle crosses over them, they are being detonated. They have been responsible for hundreds of American casualties and there doesn't appear to be any reliable way of stopping them.
Almost anything that blows up can be turned into an IED, from grenades to plastic explosives to leftover mines. A trigger device can be put together out of the most everyday of electronics—a cell phone, a garage door opener, a child's remote-control toy. The hiding places for the handmade bombs are everywhere: in the ground, aboard a truck, even inside an animal carcass.
Most U.S. casualties continue to be from IEDs or automobile-borne bombs, some of them used in suicide missions.
Also, according to some sources, fifty-four countries have produced more than 340 models of antipersonnel landmines. They cost as little as $3 to produce and are relatively easy to deploy. They can be laid anywhere, including roads, paths, fields, buildings, waterways, bridges, forests, and deserts. By contrast, it costs between $300 and $1,000 to locate and destroy a single mine, typically a very complex and time-consuming task.
Landmines can remain active more than 50 years after they are buried in the ground. For this reason, there is a growing worldwide effort to rid the world of landmines.
Some of the current methods to render explosive devices inoperative or to detonate them are:                1) Mechanical clearing means.        2) Using mine detectors to locate them and carefully removing them.        3) Detonating them with an explosive charge.        4) Detonating them with directed-energy.        5) Jamming the signal that detonates them and rendering the electronics of the detonation device inoperable.        6) Salt water open loop method.1) Mechanical Clearing Means        
When there is not a lot of time for an army to clear a minefield, it will often employ the use of certain machines to roll through and clear a safe path. Military forces employ several kinds of mine-clearing machines to clear out or detonate mines. Some machines are specifically designed for the task of mine clearance, while tanks can also be fitted with certain mine-clearing devices.
One of the more effective methods uses a flail—a set of long chains attached to a rotating drum held out on arms across the front of the tank—to beat the ground. The HYDREMA™ 910 MCV is a mine clearing vehicle, designed for clearing of placed or buried personnel or antitank mines with up to 10 kg explosive weight. The vehicle is capable of clearing a 3.5 meter wide track on firm ground such as roads and runways or on other types of ground. The clearing is done when the rotating flail detonates the mines by milling and hitting the ground. During the mine clearing process, the vehicle is driven by a hydrostatic system in the direction opposite to the normal driving direction. The clearing can be done using the joysticks or through the advanced computerized fully automatic pilot steering system.
The HYDREMA™ has a metal protective shield and heavy chains that flail at high speeds to unearth, destroy or detonate mines on contact. The flail incorporates 72 chains and hammers (though more chains can be attached if desired) to detonate and destroy mines. It can be rotated in either direction.
A deflector plate made of armored steel is mounted behind the flail. It provides an extremely high protection against blast and fragments, and preventing objects from being thrown on the vehicle. Produced in Denmark, the vehicle was first put into service with the US military at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, in order to clear dangerous areas.
Mechanical clearing means, such as rollers and striking chains can only function against pressure sensors and can also destroy mines with sensor combinations, but the risk rate is high. However, these clearing means are not only very slow and clumsy, but become worn after a certain number of mine detonations. The most effective clearing method consists of removing the mined ground with the entire width of vehicle, but high technical expenditure and effort are required for this. In this clearing method soil and mines are hurled to the front and sides and consequently absolute mine-free corridors are formed. However, the clearing speed of this method is not very high.
During World War II, to counter the use of armored vehicles to clear mines, the Germans improvised anti-tank mines by burying an artillery shell deeper in the ground attached to a sensor some distance behind the shell, so that when the tank flail or dozer blade went over the sensor the shell exploded under the tank. Today, minefields are sometimes set with a mix of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines.
Modern mines are much more difficult to clear than mines having pressure detonators. Seismic sensors prevent mines being cleared by hand.
Tanks, like the U.S. Army M-1A1 ABRAMS™ main battle tank, are often equipped with a mine plow designed to push mines out of the tank's path. The plow consists of several blades that extract the mines, a moldboard to push the mines to the side and a leveling skid to control the depth of the blade. The PANTHER™ is a 60-ton remote-controlled vehicle that is based on a modified M-60 tank hull. Using a joy stick, an operator navigates the PANTHER™ through a minefield. The vehicle uses metal rollers to set off blast or magnetic mines.
Force Protection, Inc. BUFFALO™ AND COUGAR™ mine-protected vehicles have been used by the U.S. military in mine clearance missions for more than two years. They are known as fully-armored safe deposit boxes on wheels.
The BUFFALO™ could withstand bomb blasts that would shred a lesser vehicle. Mine detection teams can examine and remove potential explosive threats by using a 30-foot robotic arm without leaving the safety of the vehicle's steel hull, or by simply running over them.
This vehicle is built to absorb explosive forces so that its passengers don't have to. The extraordinary strength of the BUFFALO™ that allows it to run through mine fields undamaged is due to the blast protection technology incorporated into the vehicle. This includes a v-shaped design that deflects energy away from the hull, solid steel wheels, and five-inch-thick ballistic-protected glass.
A disadvantage of this method is that it requires a heavy military vehicle to perform the method.
2) Using Mine Detectors to Locate them and Carefully Removing them.
Landmine detection is a slow, methodical process due to the danger involved in locating landmines. While location technology is improving, the following conventional techniques are still relied on heavily:                Probing the ground—For many years, the most sophisticated technology used for locating landmines was probing the ground with a stick or bayonet. Soldiers are trained to poke the ground lightly with a bayonet, knowing that just one mistake may cost them their lives. Carefully searching suspected or known minefields areas for mines. Often this is done by crawling slowly into the field, inserting a probe (anything from a knife to a stick) into the soil to find hard objects. When walking in mined areas, mine-clearing personnel will wear large, pillow-like pads strapped under their feet, to spread their weight and dull the impact of their footsteps, as very slight disturbances of the ground can tip off old, unstable, or intentionally sensitive mine triggers.        Trained dogs—Dogs can be trained to sniff out vapors coming from the explosive ingredients inside the landmine. Using animals like dogs that can sniff out explosive chemicals like TNT in landmines. Experiments with the Gambian giant pouched rat have indicated that it has the required sensitivity to smell, can be trained reliably with food-reward incentives, and is typically too small to set off the mines.        Metal detectors—Metal detectors are limited in their ability to find mines, because many mines are made of plastic with only a tiny bit of metal. Using metal detectors to sweep a suspected minefield. However, the detectors may not easily differentiate various types of metal objects, which slows the search.        
Scientists are developing a new ground-penetrating radar (GPR) device that may be more effective in locating and disarming landmines. This new device would be helpful in locating mines that have little or no metal content. All landmines, including plastic ones, are filled with explosive agents that have electrical properties that make them detectable to the right technology, such as GPR.
A GPR device focuses radar energy just below the ground and just a few feet in front of the user, according to researchers. The device ignores signals that bounce back from the surface and uses specially designed software to make buried objects shine brighter in the radar image. The GPR has been successful in detecting two common landmine casings filled with a waxy substance that is similar to TNT.
Once a landmine is detected, the GPR device shoots two chemical agents into the ground to deactivate it. One agent solidifies the triggering mechanism along with surrounding soil, allowing soldiers to cross the ground. The second chemical agent then solidifies the mine and soil permanently. The mine can then be shoveled out and destroyed.
Sowing genetically engineered flower seeds over suspected minefields from the air. The flowers bloom in distinctive colors when there are explosives nearby in the soil.
A disadvantage of this method is that it is slow and therefore can't be used to protect military vehicles traveling at 20 mph through the streets of Baghdad.
3) Detonating them with an Explosive Charge.
The essence of minefield breaching operations is speed. The fear that haunted Coalition planners in the Guld War was that the Iraqi minefields and obstacles would delay Coalition forces long enough for Iraq to deploy chemical weapons.
One of the fastest ways to breach a minefield is with explosives. The British system, the ROYAL ORDANCE GIANT VIPER™, uses eight rockets to carry a 67 mm diameter, 230-meter hose filled with aluminised PE6/A1 plastic explosive across a minefield. When it has landed, it is detonated in a spectacular explosion, clearing a gap 183 meters long and 7 meters wide. It will destroy most mines unless they have double-impulse fuses or are balst proofed.
Two vehicles towing GIANT VIPERS™ working in relays can clear a gap 400 meters deep. As an added precaution an armored vehicle fitted with a mine plough then clears through the gap following the explosion.
Similar line breaching systems are in use with the U.S. Army and marines, who use the M58A5 Mine Clearing Line Charge (MICLIC), and the Chinese Army which has a 425 mm Type 762 tank chasis mounted twin rocket system. One rocket in the Chinese system will clear a lane 130 meters long and 12 to 22 meters wide. The American MICLIC is trailer mounted like the GIANT VIPER™, and will clear a path 13.7 meters wide and 100.6 meters long.
On a smaller scale, man packable systems like the British Schermuly Rapid Anti-personnel Minefield Breaching System Mark 2 (RAMBS-2) can be fired from a rifle with standard ammunition. It has an explosive line 60 meters long which will clear AP mines to a width of 0.6 meters. Isreal Military Industries (IMI) have a portable system (POMINS 11) now adopted by the U.S. Army which will clear a path through barbed wire as well as clearing AP mines.
Among the most reliable, but also dangerous and time-consuming clearing methods is the use of individual relays charges, which are manually placed directly on or at the mine. However, this clearing procedure is completely unsuitable for the rapid overcoming of mine barriers.
Against modern mines, pyrotechnic clearing means are also not very effective, because they have a high resistance to blasting. Such sudden and powerful position changes of the type produced by detonating explosive, are absorbed by a shock blocking device fitted into land mines and consequently detonation is prevented.
A World War 1 telescopic wire clearing charge, known by the British as the Bangalore Torpedo, is still inuse in the U.S., Singapore, Pakistan, Isreal and Chile for both AP mine clearance and wire obstacle breaching.
A disadvantage of this method is it requires the knowledge of the location of the explosive devices and it requires the use of explosives which may not be readily available.
4) Detonating them with Directed-Energy.
Directed-energy is an umbrella term covering technologies that relate to the production of a beam of concentrated electromagnetic energy or atomic or subatomic particles.
The U.S. is introducing a new technology into the fight in Iraq that counteracts the effect of improvised explosive devices and bombs by making them ignite prematurely. The current goal is to find a way to not jam, but to pre-detonate IEDs or vehicle-borne bombs using microwave energy.
The goal is to project a power source of microwave energy such as a big spike of microwave energy from a truck- or aircraft-borne emitter into an enemy bomb that can fuse the circuitry of a blasting cap or pre-detonate it before the convoy gets there.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,773,298, which issued on Sep. 27, 1988, covered a method for locating, neutralizing and or detonating mines by the use of a laser beam:                The method makes it possible to neutralize surface-laid or camouflaged and in particular intelligent land mines, in that a focused beam of a powerful laser unit is automatically or manually systematically guided over the surface to be cleared of land mines in a grid pattern, the movement sequence of the laser beam being program controlled, so that the laser beam in computer-assisted manner locates the laid mines both systematically in the SCAN process and also in planned manner and neutralizes or detonates them by introducing energy.        
A disadvantage of this method is that a successful product using this method isn't available.
5) Jamming the Signal that Detonates them and Rendering the Electronics of the Detonation Device Inoperable
The strongest push to silence the bombs has come from the Army, which has ordered thousands of radio-frequency jammers from manufacturers. The devices intercept the signal sent from a remote location to the IED instructing it to detonate. The signal cannot make contact, therefore when it can't make contact it doesn't detonate.
Also, other devices neutralize the IEDs with radio frequency by producing a very high-frequency field, in the microwave range, at very short range to take out an IED's electronics.
New signal-jamming equipment developed by New Mexico State University's Physical Science Laboratory in collaboration with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory is proving to be effective in defeating IEDs and saving soldiers' lives.
Known as ICE, for IED Countermeasure Equipment, the system was recognized recently as one of the U.S. Army's “Top Ten Greatest Inventions of 2004.”
A disadvantage of this method is that it doesn't work on pressure sensitive landmines.
6) Salt Water Open Loop Method.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,634,273 covered an open loop minesweeping system. It's abstract states:                An open loop magnetic field minesweeping system, with a small and light weight body to be towed through seawater by a towing cable from a helicopter or other vehicle, a single sweep cable extending rearwardly a substantial distance from the body with a first electrode in cable, sleeve or sock form attached to the end of the sweep cable, and a second electrode positioned forwardly of the body to be towed and extending along and connected to the towing cable. A rectifier and transformer on the body convert AC power fed to the towed body from the towing vehicle, to DC power applied across the first and second electrodes.        
A disadvantage of this method is that it only works with marine mines.
None of the above inventions and patents taken either singly or in combination is seen to describe the instant invention as claimed. None of the above inventions and patents have eliminated the use of IEDs by terrorists. There have been over 700 fatalities caused by IEDs since the fall of Baghdad. Therefore, a portable and reliable method of neutralizing IEDs is needed.